"The Murderous Tyranny of the Turks"

by Arnold Toynbee

No Alternative.

That is why the control of the Straits, as well as the dominion over subject peoples, must be taken from the Ottoman Turks in the reorganisation of Europe, guaranteed by a stable settlement, which is the aim of the Allies. But neutrals, rightly anxious for a peace as speedy as may be compatible with the attainment of the essential objects at stake, may ask whether either or both of the objects essential to the settlement of the Turkish Empire are not attainable by less drastic measures than a redrawing of frontiers and a transference of territorial sovereignty. Cannot the liberation of the subject peoples be effected, without impairing Turkey’s territorial integrity, by some system of devolution or local autonomy, under external guarantee and supervision? Is not this a field where the chief belligerents on either side, with the addition of the United States, might work together in concert? The answer is that this was precisely the solution attempted during the 19th century, and that through the present war it has finally broken down. During the 19th century the Concert of Europe did actually bring Turkey under a certain tutelage. The Ottoman tariff was regulated by treaty; the customs and other branches of revenue were managed by an International Administration of the Ottoman Debt, representing Turkey’s bondholders. There were various experiments in local autonomy; Crete and the Lebanon enjoyed self-government under foreign guarantee; there was an attempt to cure the anarchy deliberately fomented by the Turkish government in Macedonia, by forcing the government to accept foreign gendarmerie-inspectors with definite spheres of supervision; there was a promise of reforms in the Armenian Vilayets, exacted from Turkey at the International Congress of Berlin, but never carried beyond the stage of paper schemes. It is unfortunately true that this joint European tutelage was illusory, that it failed to remove or even mitigate the murderous tyranny that has always characterised Turkish government, and that the Young Turks have used the opportunity of the War to repudiate it altogether. The British people have not lightly or inconsiderately accepted this conclusion—as they have, by implication, accepted it in framing this joint Note in conjunction with their Allies. They advance these two aims with regard to the settlement of Turkey—the liberation of the subject peoples and the expulsion of Turkey from Europe—in the absolute conviction that they are necessary and right. But this conviction is in itself a very bitter confession of failure. It marks the reversal of a policy pursued for a century past; for during the whole of the 19th century Great Britain was the chief advocate of the policy which aimed at the settlement of Turkey by the preservation of her territorial integrity subject to the active tutelage of the Concert of Europe. British diplomacy was constantly exerted on this behalf, and British belief in this policy was so sincere that half a century ago Great Britain embarked in pursuit of it on a bloody war with one of her present allies. If Great Britain is now a convinced adherent of the alternative and more drastic settlement, it is because the system of joint European control, after a century of experiment which perpetuated and aggravated the ancient tyranny, bloodshed and despair, has been made finally impossible by the present War.

The Turco-German Compact.

It was to end it that the Young Turks entered the war on Germany’s side; for foreign control automatically breaks down if one Great Power, and still more if a group of two Powers, stands out of the Concert, renounces responsibility for the policy of the Turkish government towards the subject peoples and the economic highways which it holds in its power, and supports that government effectively in repudiating all claim to intervention on the part of the other Powers concerned. But this was the bargain struck between Germany and the Young Turks when Turkey attacked the Allies, without provocation, in October, 1914. The Young Turks placed all their economic and military resources at Germany’s disposal. Turkish troops (including of course the due percentage of conscripts from the subject peoples), are fighting Germany’s battles on the Riga, Halicz and Dobrudja fronts. The vast undeveloped economic resources of the Empire are, in the event of victory, to be thrown open to German exploitation when peace returns. These are concessions which Turkey has always jealously refrained from making to any other Power; and the price Germany has paid for them is the guarantee of just one thing—that the Young Turks shall have a free hand to repudiate all external control and to carry through their policy of “Ottomanisation” to a finish.

A Free Hand to “Ottomanise.”

The Turks have not delayed in carrying out their side of the bargain, and they have been equally prompt in using the free hand assured them by Germany in return. First they repudiated the “Capitulations”—a system of treaties not particularly equitable in themselves, but still treaties to which Turkey was pledged—by which the civil liberties of foreign residents in Turkey were guaranteed against the imperfections of Turkish judicial procedure. Then they repudiated the tariff treaties, and substituted for them a new tariff (recently published) of their own. Next they abrogated the Reform Scheme for the Armenian Vilayets, which the Concert of Europe had finally induced them to ratify, and dismissed the two Inspectors-General, a Dutchman and a Norwegian, whom they had themselves commissioned to carry the scheme into effect. But these breaches of contract were minor offences compared to the Armenian Deportations, the horror of which has been indicated briefly above, and which they did not venture to carry out until the Dardanelles Expedition had failed. To complete the elimination of every non-Turkish element in the Empire, they are now trying to rid themselves of the American Missionaries.

The Campaign Against the Missionaries.

The attitude of the Young Turks towards the Missionaries shows that their “Nationalism” has made them not only criminal but insane. The American Missionaries have worked in Turkey for more than eighty years. Their aim has been to revive religion in the subject Christian peoples and to give them an enlightened modern education; they have pursued this aim disinterestedly with a striking measure of success, and they have extended their work to the Moslems as far as the latter have responded to their advances. They are the creators of practically all the secondary education that exists in Turkey to-day. The most intelligent and progressive elements in the population of the Empire have come most under their influence, and have received from them a moral and intellectual stimulus which they could never have found for themselves. The educational work of the Missionaries should have been mentioned among the attempts made during the 19th century to reform Turkey gradually by a reconstruction within; for the effect of this work was far more penetrating, and far more fraught with hope for the future, than most of the political expedients instituted with diplomatic pomp and ceremony by the Concert of the Powers. And the Missionaries were the best friends of the Turkish government as well as of their subject peoples. They took no part in their pupils’ politics; they had no ulterior political purpose of their own to serve. They were the most valuable voluntary assistants the Young Turks could have had in what should have been their foremost aims if they had acted up to their democratic professions, and they were the assistants whom they had least of all to fear.